Grave Restoration Project - Bulletin No 6

We have some exciting and ground-breaking progress to report.

The ‘Paul Bushell and David Brown Heritage Grave Restoration Project’ Committee members Louise Wilson, Patsy Templeton, Catherine Broady, Rachel Hargrave, Stan Brown and Jill Vincent (advisor) met at the Wilberforce Cemetery at 1pm on 16 April 2013. We agreed that we intend to re-create the coffin/vault style for each gravesite, without a surrounding iron-railing fence, there being no evidence that such a fence was ever a feature of the graves.

To help support our efforts at convincing people that ours is a very worthwhile cause, Jill’s husband Lester Vincent kindly provided copies of a CD containing his photos of the many First, Second and Third Fleet gravesites in the Wilberforce Cemetery. 


l to r - Stan Brown, Jill Vincent, Patsy Templeton, Catherine Broady, Rachel Hargrave
(Photo by Louise Wilson)

Committee members then re-convened at the Windsor Library at 2pm and Craig Johnson, Parks Project Officer at the Hawkesbury City Council, joined the meeting.

He confirmed that a full slab with vault restoration is acceptable to Heritage NSW. He also advised that heritage grants are available through the council, as dollar for dollar contributions. National Heritage grants or money may also be available on the same basis, possibly in support of the whole Wilberforce cemetery as a pre-cursor to supporting all historical cemeteries in the Hawkesbury area, e.g. Windsor, Sackville, St. Albans, etc.

The group is not keen to have the responsibility and expense of keeping accounts and records for trust monies. Since the Bushell/Brown grave restoration project is quite a specific one, the group also discussed ways of handling any monies which might be left over after the restoration. Craig Johnson suggested that a Cemetery Restoration Trust Fund be set up by the Hawkesbury City Council, which might start with the Bushell/Brown project, lead on to any others at Wilberforce which needed restoration and then continue on with the other historical cemeteries in the Hawkesbury as they are requested. Different sources of monies coming into the Trust Fund via crowd-funding, Heritage or other grants and individual contributions should not create any problems.

After the meeting, Craig Johnson confirmed that Council is prepared to set up a Trust Fund and collect contributions for that purpose, and assist with managing the finances and the project, including the contractors, in partnership with the family. In that way, Council can also manage OHS and public liability issues.

This is a very exciting development, as our creative solution overcomes most, if not all, of the problems besetting any family group trying to restore old graves. We think we are creating an extremely useful template for others to follow, Australia-wide.

Craig Johnson has also supplied the names of restorers who work at Rookwood Cemetery, from whom quotes will be obtained. We will start contacting all descendants of both Bushell and Brown (via email, FB, Twitter, etc) once we have a definite fund-raising target.